Career Reflection I started my first software developer job two years ago. I’ve learned so much along the way and still have tons more to learn. In a career like this, the learning never stops as this is a continually evolving industry. I love new challenges and learning new things. In conversations with fellow developers they have been impressed in my ability to learn quickly and retain information. I’ve had several people ask me how I learn new technologies and keep my passion for software engineering so strong.

Why write unit tests? As developers, we want to write code that works and has as few bugs as possible. For example, when we write some production code we expect that given an input of abc the application will respond with 123. Writing and running automated tests can give developers a high level of confidence that their code does what it’s supposed to do. Unit tests isolate the system under test and throw a variety of scenarios in the system’s direction.

What is Version Control Version control is a tool used to collaborate between people working on a codebase. The most popular version control system (VCS) tool is called Git. We will look into how Git has made open source collaboration easier and how to use this useful tool. Background Git was originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Before those days, a lot of development teams would pass files around through email, floppy disks, and archived files.

Side Project While on vacation in India, I was given the opportunity to work on an Android app for my brother-in-law. The app would be for registering employees and would have time reporting functionality. His staff is less than 20 at the moment so I thought that Firebase would be a great utility for this project. Firebase Overview I learned about Firebase recently from a Udemy course that I am taking on Android Development.

Docker Introduction I guarantee you that any company you work for nowadays will be utilizing some kind of container for testing and deploying applications. The most popular of the container softwares is Docker. The main benefit of Docker is that if someone wants to run your application on their computer, they do not have to try to match your software versions just to run it. All they need to do is have Docker installed on their machine and they will be able to run your program in an isolated container that you have given the instructions on which version of software to run and how to launch the program.

Remote Debugging We all know how to debug locally, but have you ever had an application or database running on a remote server and ever wondered if you could debug that. Well let me tell you it is possible. We try our hardest to have parity among our production and lower environments, but sometimes an exact replica can not be achieved. An example of one application at my company that could benefit from remote debugging a Production instance is the Mobile Server Team.

Linux In my three months of being a software developer I have grown to love the Linux Bash CLI. In this post, we will explore some simple Linux commands that will help you get more comfortable working with the command line. ls (lists all non-hidden files in current directory) ls -la (lists all files in current directory) cat filename.txt (prints the contents of the file to the screen) vim filename.